


The Rose and the Yew Tree

by congratsyouvegrownasoul



Category: Mortal Engines Series - Philip Reeve
Genre: Bittersweet, Canon Disabled Character, Creepy Robotic Birds, Cuddling, Disabled Character, Disabled Character of Color, F/M, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2013-07-15
Packaged: 2017-12-20 07:47:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/884773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/congratsyouvegrownasoul/pseuds/congratsyouvegrownasoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is young and he is old, but they both know so much more of war than of peace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rose and the Yew Tree

Naga wakes during the in-between time, when night bleeds into morning. Silence hangs heavy in their room, but out in the lightening darkness, he can hear the night-scout airships returning to their berths. The gentle purr of engines, the bubbling of air escaping from deflating envelopes—he is so used to them that they mingle with the quiet. His keen ears still listen, though, searching for anything out of the ordinary. He has lived through too many dawn attacks to trust this peace.

 Across the room, his wife sits on the windowsill, his wolfskin cloak bunched up underneath her, the shaggy gray fur cradling her thin, crossed legs. A Stalker raven rests in her lap, the panel at its belly hanging open and its mechanical guts spilling out. Oenone works away at it diligently, her head bowed. Her lean fingers thread the wires together, weaving them in and out of place. She stops once, moving a hand to push her glasses up her nose.  Unconscious of the dark smear of engine grease now staining her cheek, she returns to the broken bird in her hands.

Oenone looks both a child and a crone, crouching there with her shoulders bent, all her scrawny limbs tucked in around her. She’s a little girl with all her focus set on this deadly toy, or ancient beyond measure, the last of the moonlight glinting silver in her hair. In the daylight, she is still old for someone who has seen so few years, this awkward, fragile girl with wise eyes, all the soft curved lines of her face stripped away and replaced with sharp, hard angles. And yet she is young, kindled hopes burning in her black eyes, her voice and her hands gentle. Half an innocent and half a soldier, a child of earth’s mud and war’s blood.

Naga struggles to a sitting position, dragging the deadweight of his useless legs from underneath rumpled blankets. Without the forged shackles of his exoskeleton, he feels as naked and vulnerable as a baby, and hopelessly weak. For many years now, he has learned to live like this, striding confidently through the day with the legs his engineers built him and lying through the night with nothing but what is naturally his. He had accepted it, this sacrifice and this burden, had shouldered it without complaint, refusing to look back at what had been. But now he remembers what it was to be young and strong, and wishes he had more to offer his wife than arms to encircle her and a hand to hold, although she has never complained. Naga is an old man, and Oenone deserves better.

He lets his mind wander, imagining a different time and a different place, another world. When he was a boy, he had loved to dance. On festival days in his village, he had led his goats from pen to pasture early, shouldered his gun, and rushed off with his friends, returning only when the feathery bodies of hunted ducks hung from their arms. And he had danced, once, his feet light and nimble, his hands clasping some village girl’s, the pulse in her wrist beating against his fingers. Naga has not danced in a very long time, even when he still could. There is no place for dancing in an army.

Naga thinks of Oenone, if he had known her then, dancing in a clearing, her hair drawn back with a leather band, face full of laughter. It would have been her hands in his, in another world. They could have sat together on a rock, eaten roast duck wrapped in scallion pancakes, exchanged sips of goat’s milk and apple brandy.

In this world, though, the boy who kept goats and loved to dance left his village at fifteen,  crowded into the dark hold of the hugest airship he’d ever seen, and traveled further than he had ever dreamed of. He knew how to sight a scope and fire off shots, which was more than most of the League’s new soldiers do.  But men, even Tractionists, are not nearly as easy as ducks to shoot.

The first time he saw a moving city, it crawled across the plain, slow and steady, dank black smoke streaming from its massive workings, its treads crushing the earth beneath. It was huge, monstrous, ugly, and the awe and horror of it stole the breath from his lungs, gasping out to cloud the winter air.

In the borderlands, those cities grind the ground, and the ignorant armies churn against each other and litter the earth with corpses. Thus it has always been, and sometimes he thinks it will always be. A long time after Naga left his village, a girl grows up fast in the borderlands, learns the sound of airships in the night, and bombs peppering the hills. She works with her hands, forms life from death, opens the eyes of men one last time as glowing green orbs.

She is young and he is old, but they both know so much more of war than of peace.

It is strange, Naga thinks, that he, the great strong general, should dream of goats and duck pancakes.

And yet he does.

The world will be made green again, or so they say.

But Naga has spent most of his life drowning in mud and blood and death, and the wholeness of the lands where he was born has almost faded from his mind. Around him, he watches the world fall apart and reshape itself over and over, watches men rend open barriers that should not be split, watches dead men walk among the living and the dying.

He thinks, perhaps, that he and Oenone will never know a green world, and so he looks back and longs, without hope, to dance.

She stirs, then, unfurling her legs so that they dangle down from the sill, falling across the tiled walls, each little porcelain plate embellished with red flowers. Naga envies her the ease of her movements. As uncomfortable in her own skin as Oenone often is, every one of her joints works smoothly with the others. He pushes himself laboriously onto his elbows, his broad back rubbing against the bed’s headboard.

“How long have you been awake?”

She glances down at her lap—she has closed the gaping hole in the bird’s stomach, the metal plates now fitting seamlessly together.

“An hour, maybe two.”

They have not shared a bed as often as a husband and wife ought to, their duties taking them far away from each other regularly. Still, he knows she is an early riser; years of living in a war zone and working long hours over her machines have drilled that into her. In the mornings, they often stay abed until they need to leave, Oenone with some tangle of clockwork, Naga with piles of paper, a mess of maps and stratagems. She knows not to read over his shoulder, but he asks her for advice sometimes, offering up some attack or retreat. In return, she shows him the workings of electric brains, a bloodstream of wires, the crafting of metal skin.

Oenone holds the raven tightly, hands clasped as if in the prayers she insists on performing every night. The little creature’s eyes light up, vivid green and deathless. Above her fingers, its wings unfurl, feathers stabbing at the air. His wife smiles, a quick flash of joy, rare and precious as a fleck of gold in granite. Then, she opens her hands and releases the bird.

It soars through the air, arcing over the bed with its wings whirring. As it dives downward, heading directly for him, he flinches, knowing the razor sharpness of the Stalker birds’ claws. But when it hits its mark, thudding softly into his chest, its padded talons don’t even pierce the fabric of his shirt.

“What model is this? I’ve never seen it before,” he asks, wondering. The bird cocks its head up at him, and actually _chirps._

“It’s not,” Oenone responds, looking exceptionally pleased with herself. “There are no two birds of this feather.”

He finds himself grinning at her truly awful stabs at wordplay.

“Then I suppose they can’t flock together? How sad.”

Oenone laughs softly. “That was a particularly bad one, wasn’t it? I’m quite proud.”

“A true triumph.”

He runs a finger across the top of the bird’s head. Across the room, Oenone steps onto the floor and wanders over, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I put in a recording chip,” she says. “It can only repeat a few phrases at a time, and it’s got a horrible long-term memory, so it wouldn’t be any use as a spy, but it’s a nice novelty.”

“Only you could transform an attack bird into a pet,” Naga says fondly. “How do I activate the recording?”

She leans over, a few loose strands of her hair brushing against his face.

“Pull this little feather here, like a tab. Then say what you want to.”

She leans back, falling against the pillows.

Naga does as she instructs, bending down over the bird, and feeling a bit ridiculous talking to a robotic avian.

“Good morning, Oenone,” he announces, then pushes the feather tab back into place.

“Good morning, Oenone,” the bird replies, its beak clacking open and closed.

“I can’t decide whether that’s cute or frightening,” the recipient of the greeting comments, readjusting her glasses.

“Which did you intend it as?”

“Both. Definitely both.” She gives him a shy smile. “You can take it on campaign with you, if you want.”

“It will remind me of you,” he says solemnly. “Cute and frightening.”

Oenone blushes and crosses her arms over her narrow chest. She doesn’t preen over compliments, even teasing ones, but rather tries to deflect them. She is unused to the attention, he is sure, which just makes him stubbornly continue to praise her.

He sets the bird aside on the nightstand, but it flaps off, perching on the window frame and looking down at them with beady eyes the color of emerald.

Outside the war rages on, and Naga has stacks of paperwork, but that can keep. Just for these few moments, he opens his arms to his wife, and she folds herself carefully into his embrace.

 


End file.
